The Importance of Resting in Summer

The last of a season in the subtropics

Dear Reader

This month’s newsletter is in praise of doing less, achieving nothing, stopping here wherever we got to.

Imperfections

“As I passed I saw a cafe, a cafe on the street, with an open door, and one small round table outside, just big enough for two persons, two glasses of wine, two small iron chairs, a diminutive cafe.. shabby, with a faded sign, a dull window, lopsided walls, uneven roof. The smallness of it, the intimacy of it, the humanity of its proportion.. A human being feels one can sit in such a cafe even if one’s hair is not perfectly in place and one’s shoes are not shined.. One could sit there and feel unique, feel in tune with the world, or out of tune, feel human and open to human emotion.. One could sit there if one felt the world too big and too barbaric, and feel once more in a human setting, a proper setting for a human being.. Why did I feel warmed by imperfections, discomfort, and patina? Because intense living leaves scars.. inner scars, softened, human wear and tear”.

- Anaïs Nin

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Summer Was This

She stood in the bright moonlight at the door

Of a strange room, she threw her slippers on the floor—

                    Again, again

              You heard the patter of the rain,

              The starving rain—it was this Thing,

Summer was this, the gold mist in your eyes;—

                     Oh God! it dies,

                     But after death—,

    To-night the splendour and the sting

    Blows back and catches at your breath,

The smell of beasts, the smell of dust, the scent of all the roses in the world,

                 the sea, the Spring,

The beat of drums, the pad of hoofs, music, the dream, the dream, the

                 Enchanted Thing!

From The Fête by Charlotte Mew

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Laughing

They jumped the ditch and headed back toward Mama Lara’s house. We tried to make ourselves laugh because laughing was how we worried, how we consented to love and how we said I’d like you to love me.

From this stunning collaboration, City Summer, Country Summer: A photographer and a writer separately explore black boyhood and the season by Kiese Laymon and Andre D Wagner

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Intense Awareness

I’m going to settle for small, random stabs of extreme interestingness – moments of intense awareness of the things I’m about to lose, and of gladness that they exist.

- Helen Garner’s thoughts in The Guardian

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Like Pearls Slipping Off a String

I believe the nicest and sweetest days are not those on which anything very splendid or wonderful or exciting happens but just those that bring simple little pleasures, following one another softly, like pearls slipping off a string.

- From Anne of Avonlea by L. M. Montgomery

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Notes on Parenting

My husband agreed to take on the responsibility of daily medication for the brushtail possum living in our garage. It saved the possum’s life. I was grateful because while I had organised the diagnosis and treatment plan from the vet, the actual administration felt like a lot, at a time when I was trying to do a bit less.

Every evening my husband raced home from work to catch the possum in that twilight moment when the little creature was stirring but not yet leaving on his nocturnal errands. In the first few days the poor thing was so weak and slow to rouse that my husband thought he was dead. But he comes to my voice now, my husband said, visibly awestruck. That joy in knowing you helped wildness.

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My son said, “You’re the most loving mother in the world until you’re swimming and then you are like, get out of my space, I want my space”.

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I have been auditing my mothering. I am reading my diaries - most of which are kept public on a blog. How very helpful.

When I find an error in the inventory, to mark my mistake, I send a text to my daughter in the middle of the night. I apologise for not letting her run the air-conditioner more (I didn’t realise how truly hot your bedroom gets) or for not cutting dairy out of my diet when I was breastfeeding her, as it turned out she was lactose intolerant.

Apparently, my daughter has been auditing my mothering, too. Now that school is finished, she is working part-time as a nanny and seems to be revisiting parenting decisions of mine she once condemned. This time she evaluates them differently, considers the evidence in new light.

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My mother told me about my daughter’s dream and how the imagery was horrifying. She was surprised when my daughter agreed to hear her interpretation. “You know, but you’re ignoring what you know. Something is being destroyed because of it”.

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Did you have a hard day, I asked. You had a client coming in from Juvenile Detention?

They came in shaking, my husband said.

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The mothers hold the hope, my husband says to me.

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Husband: I just want to go to my hometown and walk into the grounds of a thousand-year-old Abbey, so I can lie prostate on the ground, and feel the dirt beneath me.

Good male friend: Supine.

Husband: Huh?

Friend: Supine.

Husband: Really?

Friend: I think it is supine. That’s what it says on the patient sheets when I walk into theatre. The patient will be supine¹.

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Their father is moving overseas. Like my father, like my husband’s father. So, all that time ago I picked my father, after all. Well, parts of my father.

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My daughter bought me a puzzle for my birthday. She said, “I can do this with you”, like a promise to visit more.

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Me to my thirteen-year-old son: You change your views as you get older. For instance, when I was a very young woman I used to think women who liked spending time with children were a bit dim.

My son to me: Maybe you got dim.

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I adored all the detail in this dream shared with me by someone working for me in my team. Possibly, my policy development workshops are a little challenging.

“I had the weirdest dream last night - you were Chairing the XX meeting -  in your apartment, dressed in pyjamas, I ended up getting changed into my PJs too to be supportive of your clothes choice. A bunch of attendees (mostly men) in suits turned up and we had them seated, cross legged in a circle on a Persian carpet, offering them hot apple tea. They thought we were so strange”.

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My father looks at a photograph of me as a child² and says tenderly, as though to my inner child, What depth there is in this small child’s brain.

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If I Did Not Refuse to Write Parenting Advice Columns

I very rarely dispense parenting advice, even though I am a most excellent mother. Partly this is because I believe young parents do not actually want your advice. But also, it is very difficult to give advice without sounding like you just don’t listen very well.

A very high number of parenting books are written by parents with only one child.

I guess you guys have more time for writing books. And, I’m not saying you don’t have some excellent parenting insights to share. But, I do wonder if, statistically speaking, you guys had less chance to see how little your parenting matters. Ok, how little it matters, sometimes.

Sometimes, quite often.

It is just there is no perfecting in parenting. We are the shepherd, not the engineer. Two children, different results. Etcetera. But if I were inclined to write parenting advice columns then here’s a list of columns I would write:

1. Teach Your Very Young Children to Cook, and Yes, Persist Through the Painful Early Years

   This is an investment in the future. You will eat a lot of bad meals to begin with and it will be double the workload for quite a while. However, one day the kid will be able to cook a decent family meal and you can have a cooking roster and it won’t always be you. But more than that, much more than that, they will realise how much work cooking is and how it is satisfying to nourish others, but also, discouraging when people don’t appreciate your efforts.

2. How to Prepare Your Children for a Smart Phone

   All the advice columns on smart phones seem to focus on keeping children off social media for as long as possible or installing a bunch of parental controls on their phones when they eventually get them. I get it, but that’s a lot of abstinence and control. I think the only thing that really works is making being off your phone a better option sometimes than being on your phone. Spend the early years with them being outdoors and active so they know how to look for that when they feel cooped up. But also, spend some time idling the day away so they know how to endure boredom and even, enjoy a slow day without distraction. Then, just keep offering those opportunities to spend time together like this as they get older. Even as they become young adults.

3. Parent Friends are Not About the Kids

   Almost everything awful about parenting - the boredom, the exhaustion, the fear, the failures, the self-doubt - are as bad as they are because of loneliness. If you can experience those moments with another mother, who really gets you and who you can be yourself with, then you can get through almost anything. Sometimes, the best days are the boring parenting ones with lots of unscheduled time together and a conversation that ends up sticking with you for the rest of your life.

4. Teach Your Children to Sit with Difficult Feelings and Watching Them Sit with Difficult Feelings Will Be You Learning to Also Sit with Difficult Feelings

   I wish I had known about this earlier. I lucked upon some of this in my approach to parenting because I was thinking so much about personal boundaries. But, this is the single most helpful thing I have gone on to learn about how we can avoid self-destructive behaviours in later life. And I come from a family with anxiety.

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In Praise of Hanging Out

Meanwhile, I see young people struggling every day with an inability to simply get together to do something—or even to do nothing. My daughters, both teenagers, yearn for outside-of-school socializing, yet often neither they nor their friends are willing to take the step of suggesting a get-together. When they do, often they find that the kids they ask are so overscheduled they simply have no downtime of the type that might profitably be filled with hanging out.

From Dan Kois’ night with Sheila Liming, author of Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time in Slate.

I also love this quote from Sheila Liming in a separate article:

One of your arguments, essentially, is to be where you are. But when thinking about fostering relationships, it seems more intuitive to me to text a friend or sibling rather than chat with a stranger while waiting in line somewhere. How do you think about prioritizing not the relationship that has depth but the relationship that has only proximity?

I keep thinking about this concept with reference to democracy. Democracy hinges on our ability to care about each other, whether or not we actually know each other very well. Like, we have to have this feeling: I want you to have good infrastructure and good schools, even if I don’t benefit from them. This hypothetical care is very important for sustaining the workings of the society that we live in.

I live 2,000 miles away from my family, so I totally get prioritizing that. But if that means that we’re taking ourselves out of a contemporary situation and ignoring the people around us, what we’re also doing is sending the signal that those people don’t matter to us — that the person sitting next to us in a room might as well not exist — which I think is a somewhat dangerous message to broadcast in a democracy.

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In Celebration of Surrender

The art of losing isn’t hard to master

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, loved ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

- The Art of Losing isn’t Hard to Master by Elizabeth Bishop

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The Private Sector Can’t Solve Big Problems

This is an excellent piece by Professor John Quiggin in The Conversation.

But things go downhill when Chalmers turns to “impact investing”. He says:

across the social purpose economy, in areas such as aged care, education and disability, effective organisations with high-quality talent can offer decent returns and demonstrate a social dividend.

Surely he is aware that aged care is a disaster area, the subject of a Royal Commission, even before its failings were brutally exposed by COVID.

As for education, the disaster of VET-FEE Help, in which private providers offered students inducements including free laptops to sign up for programs that loaded them with debt and provided little education, shows what can happen when investors want dividends, and aren’t too choosy about how they get them.

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We’re Co-Sleepers, Sue Me, I Don’t Care

The modesty of this tour of her apartment by Julia Fox, single mother with a toddler who is also practicing acceptance with her mice problem, is just delightful.

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Advice for Husbands

Minimising the mental load of grocery shopping for your female partner.

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Fear of Death

Longevity (in relationships) has always been the gold societal standard and I honestly think it comes back to our fear of death. (ED: I think everything comes back to our fear of death!) There is an art to letting go. It’s okay to break a contract. Or rather, to refuse to sign one. To change one's mind. Hell, it’s even okay to die! We are so hell-bent on keeping everything alive – physically but also emotionally, etc. Death is not the worst thing that can happen to a person and it’s certainly not the worst thing that can happen to a relationship.

… The truth is, most connections are temporary and all love stories will end. Can you imagine building a relationship where both parties prioritize letting go? That’s what I want.

I don’t want to live in fear of loss. I know it’s coming. There is always an ending. I want to look it in the eyes from now on…

Another favorite thread of mine in your book is the string of scenes we get between you and your children. In one, your anger during the pandemic leads to you standing in the kitchen, breaking plates one by one, as your children look on. As you say to your children later, “I am not unbreakable.”

I loved this scene so much. Reading it, I couldn’t help but think of the very calm, measured parenting advice that so often feels like it’s asking mothers (the primary audience) to evacuate all individuality and emotion. To be unbreakable and surrender to motherhood. There’s a common belief that breaking down in front of our children is a flaw rather than a gift, but also that breaking down can never be tender. In your book though, this scene is not traumatic—it marks a movement for you, a point of growth for you as a person and for your family. It’s a crucial arc in the story. Has showing up as yourself as a parent—allowing yourself to feel everything, as you say in the book—changed your relationship with your children?

I recently touched on this but I have never loved my mother more than I have when she was willing to show me her full humanity. If it's my job to set an example for my kids – and I believe it is – then part of that example is modeling humanity without shame. This idea that children shouldn’t see their parents as vulnerable/human/constantly growing is bullshit. There is a difference between venting to one’s children and sharing with them, unloading on them and allowing them to witness you as a person who is having a very human experience just like they are. People have a hard time differentiating the two and subscribe to this very antiquated notion that it is our job as parents to be robotic and inhuman as not to traumatize – or worse – try to relate—to our children.

From an interview with Rebecca Woolf (author of All of This) in Amanda Montei’s newsletter, Mad Woman.

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Monstrous

This is such a beautifully written piece. How I miss Ta-Nehisi Coates writing more frequently.

West calls his struggle the right to be a “free thinker,” and he is, indeed, championing a kind of freedom—a white freedom, freedom without consequence, freedom without criticism, freedom to be proud and ignorant; freedom to profit off a people in one moment and abandon them in the next; a Stand Your Ground freedom, freedom without responsibility, without hard memory; a Monticello without slavery, a Confederate freedom, the freedom of John C. Calhoun, not the freedom of Harriet Tubman, which calls you to risk your own; not the freedom of Nat Turner, which calls you to give even more, but a conqueror’s freedom, freedom of the strong built on antipathy or indifference to the weak, the freedom of rape buttons, pussy grabbers, and fuck you anyway, bitch; freedom of oil and invisible wars, the freedom of suburbs drawn with red lines, the white freedom of Calabasas.

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Collaboration Fatigue, Checking Emails and Lying on Picnic Tables

There is so much to like in this interview with Cal Newport in the The New York Times. For instance, the individualisation of productivity and the limits of cheap collaboration:

The only way to get out of that suboptimal equilibrium is to completely change the way the organization collaborates. We have to replace the hyperactive hive-mind work flow with explicit alternatives for the assignment and organization of work, and individuals can’t do that on their own. But one of the questions here is how did productivity become personal in the first place? It’s an unusual notion in the history of large-scale economic organization — this idea that we leave it up to the individual to figure out how to organize their work.

Constant context shifting makes you miserable:

So if you have to work on something that’s cognitively demanding, the rule has to be zero context shifts during that period.

And the benefits of slow productivity:

Right now, I open the book with a story of John McPhee working on one of his first really complex New Yorker pieces. He spent two weeks lying on a picnic table in his backyard trying to figure out, How am I going to make this piece work? On the small scale, you’re like, you spent all day lying on a table, you’re incredibly unproductive. But zoom out to John McPhee’s career, and you’re like, you’re one of the most productive and impactful writers of all time. So how do you actually work with your mind and create things of value? What I’ve identified is three principles: doing fewer things, working at a natural pace, but obsessing over quality. That trio of properties better hits the sweet spot of how we’re actually wired and produces valuable meaningful work, but it’s sustainable.

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On the Benefits of Quiet Contemplation

It’s not just writers. It’s everyone. The writer is just an extreme case of something everyone struggles with.

“On the one hand, to function well, you have to believe in yourself and your abilities and summon enormous confidence from somewhere. On the other hand, to write well, or just to be a good person, you need to be able to doubt yourself - to entertain the possibility that you’re wrong about everything, and to have sympathy with people whose lives and beliefs and perspectives are very different from yours”.

The internet was supposed to do this for people, but it didn’t. “This balancing act” - the confidence that you know everything plus the ability to believe that you don’t - “only works or works best, if you reserve a private space for it”.

- Jonathan Franzen in a piece by Taffy Brodesser-Akner in The New York Times.

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Grandmothers and Mothers

“This kind of presence isn’t just for moral support, but has a teaching dimension too. Caring confidently for little children is as much a skill as a matter of instinct. For most of human history, this has been passed on via informal knowledge transfer between generations of women, and within extended families.

In contrast, both the Mumsnet advice-rejecters and the “Glammy” grandmothers take, as a basic premise, the idea that mothers don’t need their mothers in any practical sense. Instead, the job of a “Glammy”, per Jane Gordon, is not to support a mother but to circumvent her: “to be as unconventional as possible by helping them to question […] the rules society and their parents impose on them.””

From Mary Harrington’s “Does feminism have mummy issues?” in UnHerd.

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In Between

The agony and the ecstasy in birthing photos.

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On Becoming a Grandmother

Right before the baby is due my son’s partner decides that she wants me to come to the birth. There has been no mention of this in the nine months before. It is so long since I had my babies. Both my births were a horror show. How will I know how to help? Frightened, I ask a friend what I need to do and she tells me, “They just want your grounded energy. That is all you are being asked to bring.” It is odd to see myself reflected in these words. Grounded energy. I know what this means. My job is to leave my anxiety at the door.

A lovely piece by my friend, Jessie Cole in The Guardian

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Earthed

Not precisely, like a pylon or

A pop-up toaster, but in a general

Way, stuck in the mud.

- From Earthed by U. A. Fanthorpe (sent to me by a friend saying “sleep well”).

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I Want to See This

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Shadow History

“I think you hit an age where you want to go back into the past, and you want either to romanticise it, or to understand the shadow history of which you weren’t aware at the time. A lot of great film directors have done that. At a certain age, Federico Fellini made Amarcord about his childhood; Alfonso Cuarón made Roma; Woody Allen made Radio Days; Ingmar Bergman made Fanny and Alexander. I’m writing fiction that took place in 1981. I do not want to write anything with a fucking cell phone in it”.

- Bret Easton Ellis in UnHerd on his novel, The Shards

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Visiting Middle Aged Women’s Homes

Asia Chmielewska in Spain.

Jo Walker in Australia.

And, I always pay attention to someone who quotes Françoise Sagan, so, when I read her Insta bio, I thought, of course: Anna Piiroinen in Finland.

1. Our friend is an anaesthetist.

2. Several years ago, someone in my family received genetic testing for medical reasons and discovered that though we have found no trace of it in our ancestry research, we have some African heritage. My son and I have very dark eyes, and I think of them as like a message in a bottle carried across the sea to us.